Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
Your Louth shot looks better pulled off the browser - I will stick my neck out and guess this is the real colour rather than sRGB, which is a good compromise for bad systems, but doesn't do full justice to colour (dives for cover before Clive sees this).
|
I agree the Louth shot colours look better but the embedded ICC profile with the image is HP w2408 wide HS New
It looks as though you have got the working colour space of Photoshop set to the colour profile of your monitor. You should set the working colour space for Photoshop to one of the commonly recognised ones - sRGB or Adobe RGB - other specialist wide gamut work spaces are ColorMatch RGB or ProPhoto RGB. This is different to the colour profile of your monitor which is essentially a look up table to tell the monitor how to display the colours.
As Chris says - sRGB doesn't do full justice to colour because of its a fairly limited colour gamut... BUT unless you have spent approaching £1000 on an Eizo monitor or similar (how good is your system
), the sad fact of life is that your monitor will not physically display the colours of the wide gamut spaces (although printers can do better than monitors in some parts of the spectrum) . And even if it did, another sad fact of life is that most people viewing your images a) can't display them & b) even if they could, couldn't render them properly because they haven't got a browser that can read colour profiles.
Now let me say at this point I'm into colour management... I've got a spyder 3 & regularly re profile my monitor, I use Adobe RGB in all my image editing and I've had separate profiles written for various papers that I print on, but when I post to web I convert to sRGB. I've got Firefox 3.0.3 but... I can't be bothered to set my browser up for colour management - if people posting web images cant be bother to adhere to the sRGB standard well....
So
1) profile your monitor and make sure this profile is loaded when your OS starts
2) set the working colour space for photoshop to Adobe RGB is you are making prints but if just producing web images set to sRGB
3) have your printer papers profiled
4) before uploading to web ensure converted to sRGB